


We Dreamed of Castles

by CelticAurora



Category: Pillars of the Earth
Genre: AU - House Building, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic Disputes, F/M, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Jack is a contractor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 13:51:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4062367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelticAurora/pseuds/CelticAurora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Modern AU. Jack Shareburg lives a quiet life, working as a contractor for Jackson Homes and Contracting and dreaming of building beautiful houses. But his quiet life gets thrown through a loop when the beautiful Aliena Thompson walks into his office and asks him to design and build a home for her and her husband, Alfred. Despite knowing she's well out of reach, Jack can't help but fall in love with her the more they work together.</p>
<p>And the more they work together, the more Jack sees. The Thompson's facade of domestic bliss starts to crumble as Jack spends time with the couple, watches Aliena come to look over the designs with bruises on her face and half-hearted stories about how they got there. The more Jack sees, the more he wants to do to put a smile back on Aliena's face.</p>
<p>Some dreams are bigger than houses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Dreamed of Castles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimpernickel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimpernickel/gifts).



> So [kimpernickel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kimpernickel/pseuds/kimpernickel) challenged me to give her a plot to a modern AU for The Pillars of the Earth.
> 
> I wasn't actually supposed to write it. But look. I did.
> 
> And yes, I changed Jack's last name from Jackson to Shareburg, which is his father's last name, because while I love Jack to bits and pieces, Jack Jackson is a ridiculous name.

It was sometime during lunch when she walked in.

Jackson Homes and Contracting was largely empty at the time; most of the workers there had gone out to lunch at a nearby café. It was a Friday, after all, and right before a holiday, it merited a lunch out. Aside from a rather bored secretary who was on the phone with her boyfriend and one or two dedicated but overworked interns, Jack was the only one there.

He was taking what he called a “working lunch,” which meant he was bowed over his desk, nose almost pressed against his blue drafting paper, and occasionally remembering he had a soggy tuna salad sandwich that he nibbled at. Strains of classical music could be heart faintly; he worked best with music playing, but it had to be classical, and it had to be low enough that he could just barely hear it.

“Hello?”                                                                                 

Jack jumped, drafting pencil flying from his fingers. It clattered back down on his desk, rolled across the wooden surface, and then fell to the floor, rolling again until it stopped at the feet of the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

She looked too good, too beautiful to be real. Her glossy brown hair was swept into an elegant knot at the back of her head; her eyeliner was perfect around her brown eyes, and her red lipstick accentuated the fullness of her lips. She was dressed in a crisp navy skirt suit and heels, and if the heat outside bothered her, she gave no indication of it.

Her presence made Jack suddenly feel painfully self-aware of how disheveled he looked. His bright red hair was rumpled from his habit of raking his fingers through it as he worked, his sleeved were shoved up to his elbows, and his hands were smeared with graphite from his pencils.

_Oh God,_ he thought. _Please don’t tell me I have tuna on my face, too…_

“Sorry,” the woman replied with a smile that was, thankfully, more amused than scornful. “I didn’t mean to startle you – the secretary said that there was still one contractor here I could talk to. Let me get that for you.”

She knelt down to pick up Jack’s wayward pencil, and he noticed something – she had a pencil stuck casually through her bun. It made him smile a little. Somehow, that detail made her seem more human, less like some flawless and imposing goddess of business who had strolled into his office. She straightened up, offering the pencil back to Jack.

“Again, I’m sorry. I don’t suppose I could…consult with you?”

Jack was no fool. He wasn’t about to pass up this opportunity, to have this woman in his office at least a few minutes more. He jumped up, taking the pencil back and hoping that, in his excitement, he didn’t snatch it as hard as he thought he might have.

“Absolutely!” he said. New projects excited him – and he was always willing to take on a new project, even if he was in the middle of other projects as he currently was. It was a habit that drove Phillip, his boss, crazy. He extended his hand to the woman. “Jack Shareburg, pleasure to meet you.”

She took his hand, shaking it. “Aliena Thompson. Pleasure’s all mine.”

“Thompson? Any relation to the Thompsons of Thompson Construction?” Jack knew the company well; he saw their trucks all over the city, and they were one of the biggest urban contractors in the region, if not in the whole country. They might have put Jackson Homes and Contracting out of business but for the fact that Thompson Construction was more in the business of office buildings and other urban structures.

Aliena smiled. “Their current CEO is my husband.”

Well, _fuck_. Jack glanced down at her left hand, finding that there was, indeed, a ring parked on her ring finger. It was, in Jack’s own opinion, a rather ugly thing, the band too big on Aliena’s slender fingers, the diamond oversized and gaudy. It looked less like a token of eternal love and devotion and more like a warning: _Back off, she’s taken._

Not that Jack thought he had any chance with her in the first place. He had been easy prey in secondary school – taunted for his red hair, reading glasses, and twiggy frame; harassed by the school athletes for being “gay” because he enjoyed art and theatre; stuffed into lockers just because he was small and fit in them. Even now, less than a year away from thirty, he still had the slender, almost gangly frame of a teenager. He had no chance with a woman like Aliena. But if she was married? His chances dropped into the negatives.

But why did any of that matter, anyways? He barely even knew her. She had literally just walked into his office less than five minutes ago. Furthermore, she was a client. Not a new friend, a client. A very pretty one, for the matter, but this was just a business relationship.

So why did he have to try so hard not to blush and act like a damn fool with her in his office?

“Ah. Well, he must be a very lucky man.” And that was probably still the wrong thing to say. He cleared his throat. “Won’t you, um…you can sit. Please. The chairs don’t bite.”

God, that was probably the most ridiculous thing to say. If Aliena thought so, however, she said nothing; she offered him a smile that belonged in a toothpaste commercial and took a seat in one of the chairs in front of his desk.

“So, Mr. Shareburg – ”

“Oh, you can, ah…you can call me Jack.”

“Jack, then.” She nodded. “I suppose before I tell you what I’ve come to see you about today, I should probably ask you, is your company strictly in the business of remodeling houses that already exist?”

“Oh, no.” Jack shook his head. “A large part of the business we do is remodeling, but we do have the means of building from the ground up. I take it that’s what’s brought you here?”

“Yes, yes.” She absently twisted the gaudy wedding ring on her finger. “Alfred and I have been living at a place since we married four years ago. His father died recently – his father was the previous CEO – and, as such. Alfred took his place. Now, with that promotion, obviously, there was a bit more money with the job, and we decided – well, Alfred decided – that we should have a place made for us. A place we would love, maybe raise children in one day…”

Her voice turned a little wistful at the end, and Jack frowned, feeling a twinge of empathy. It sounded as though, despite wanting children, Alfred and Aliena had been, thus far, unlucky. But just like that, she lifted her chin, and her confidence returned.

“At any rate, we’d like our own place – custom-made, basically. Ordinarily, I would have left it to his company, but they’re really more of an urban contractor, and I don’t want my home looking like a building that belongs in downtown London, you know?”

“Oh, yeah…yeah,” Jack agreed, nodding.

“So, are you simply a contractor? Or do you design, as well?”

“I design,” Jack said, tapping the blueprint on the desk in front of him. “And then, I build. Well, I mean, I have a team to assist me, obviously, but I do build with them.”

Aliena nodded, looking impressed. “A man of many talents, then?”

“Sure, we’ll call it that.”

“Do you think you’d be interested in taking me on?” Aliena glanced to the blueprint spread across Jack’s desk. “You do seem to be in the middle of something.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be a problem!” Jack rolled up the blueprint, not really bothering to be neat about it, and tossed it onto the work table behind him. “I’m happiest working on a few things at once.”

Aliena smiled that brilliant smile again. “Wonderful! So, how does this work? Where do we proceed from here?”

“Well,” Jack said, “we’ll start with a consultation, where I sit down with you and your husband and I get an idea as to what you two are looking for in your house. I’ll draw up designs from there, bring them to the pair of you for approval, submit them to an inspector to make sure there aren’t any major structural flaws and that they’ll comply with local housing codes.”

“Sounds straightforward enough. Do we build from there?”

“Basically. Once everything’s cleared for approval, we take a survey of the land, make sure there’s nothing that will lead to structural damage on the house, no buried pipes…or, you know, buried _people_ – ” He broke off, unsure of how Aliena might take that. It was a common joke throughout Jackson Homes and Contracting, especially after the whole debacle with Richard III having been found buried under a car park, and most of the time, when they made the same joke to the clients, they laughed. Some, however, found it in bad taste.

Aliena, fortunately, laughed. “Well, let’s certainly hope for no buried people.”

“Yeah, that’d be unfortunate,” Jack agreed. “And then, from there, we hire the laborers, buy the building materials, and start building.”

“Wonderful!”

“Do you and your husband already have land for the house?” Jack asked.

“We’re getting there. We think we’ve found a place that’s perfect. The agent selling our house is going over our paperwork for the plot of land we’ve found.”

“Excellent.” Jack couldn’t help but smile – Aliena’s enthusiasm was contagious. He grabbed a business card from the stack that was precariously perched on the already-crowded top of his printer. “Here’s my card, just give me a call to set up an appointment for the first consultation!”

“Thank you.” Aliena accepted the card, then extended her hand to Jack for a shake. “I look forward to working with you, Jack.”

He took her hand, shaking it. “I look forward to working with you as well, Mrs. Thompson.”

She nodded, taking her purse and heading for the door. At the door, however, she stopped, glancing over her shoulder at Jack, who was already digging out the battered notebook he kept for his clients – he already on his fifth one in as many years with Jackson Homes and Contracting.

“Jack?”

He looked up, slightly startled. “Y-Yes?”

A soft smile came to her lips. “You can call me Aliena.”

Without even waiting for a response from him, she was gone. Jack leaned back in his chair, his search for his notebook temporarily abandoned. He heard Aliena’s heels clicking down the tiled hallway on her way out of the building, and his office still smelled faintly of her perfume. Her smile lingered in Jack’s memory; he ran a hand through his hair, then pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger with a sigh.

It was not every day that a woman as beautiful as Aliena walked into his office. The ones that did usually seemed less than impressed by Jack, and treated him with something that was just on this side of kindness. For them, he was a means to an end – a renovated kitchen, a finished basement, a new addition to a house – and outside of that, he was beneath them. They didn’t particularly care to chat with him, much less call him by his first name. Or let him call them by their first names.

“She’s just being polite,” Jack told himself firmly. That was all it was, Aliena was just being polite. Politer than most, which was a compliment to her parents, for having raised her so well. But it was nothing more than that.

So why did the memory of her smile remain? Why did it leave him with that odd swooping feeling in his stomach, as though he’d just plummeted from the highest hill on a roller coaster?

Jack groaned, letting his head drop to his desk.

“I am _so screwed_.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you need me you can [find me on Tumblr](http://thatdeadpoetgirl.tumblr.com)


End file.
